In the Middle Ages, animal stories were immensely
popular throughout Europe, North Africa, and
the Middle East. The people of the time were,
of course, dependent on wild and domestic animals
for their survival, and so had an obvious interest
in the animals around them. But there is more
to it than just a requirement for knowledge
of the animals they knew and used; there is
a distinctly spiritual and even mystical aspect
to the animal lore of the Middle Ages.

The medieval period was intensely religious.
In western Europe, the religion was Christianity;
in North Africa and the Middle East it was primarily
Islam. The Jews and their religion were found
almost everywhere, living among Christians and
Muslims, sometimes tolerated, sometimes not.
Despite the frequent violence between them,
all three religions were closely related and
shared many of the same spiritual and historical
texts. In particular, all three considered all
or most of the Hebrew Bible (called the Old
Testament by Christians), which contains many
references to animals, to be sacred.

In the Christian west, it was commonly believed
that the natural world, the so-called "book
of nature", had been arranged as it was
by God to provide a source of instruction to
humanity. This idea was based, at least in part,
on biblical verses such as this one from the
book of Job: "But ask the animals, and
they will teach you, or the birds of the air,
and they will tell you; or speak to the earth,
and it will teach you, or let the fish of the
sea inform you. Which of all these does not
know that the hand of the Lord has done this?
In his hand is the life of every creature and
the breath of all mankind." (Job 12:7-10).
Animals were said to have the characteristics
they do not merely by accident; God created
them with those characteristics to serve as
examples for proper conduct and to reinforce
the teachings of the Bible. As the pelican
revives her dead young after three days with
her own blood, so Christ "revived"
humanity with his blood after three days in
the grave. The way the young of the hoopoe
care for their elderly parents shows how human
children should care for theirs. As doves
are safe from their enemy the dragon
as long as they stay in the shelter of the peridexion
tree, so Christians will be safe from their
enemy Satan as long as they stay in the shelter
of the Church. As the eagle
rejects any of its young that cannot stare unflinching
into the sun, so God will reject sinners who
cannot bear the divine light. All of Creation
was said to reflect the Creator, and to learn
about the Creator one could study the Creation.

Animals had been written about for centuries
before the Christian era, but it was Christianity
that took the stories and made them into religious
allegories. The first known text to do this
was the Physiologus,
written in Greek in Alexandria in the second
or third century CE. This collection of animal
lore is explicitly Christian; it briefly describes
an animal, and continues with an Christian allegorical
interpretation. The Physiologus was a
"bestseller" that was translated into
most of the major languages of Europe and western
Asia; it is said that it was the most widely-distributed
book in Europe after the Bible. Many variations
on the text appeared over the centuries. The
original Physiologus text, describing
less than 50 animals, continued to evolve, accumulating
more beasts and additional moral interpretations.
Around the seventh century, Isidore
of Seville wrote his Etymologiae,
an encyclopedia of which part was about animals,
derived from the books of Classical authors
such as Pliny
the Elder. When the Physiologus combined
with the Etymologiae and other texts,
the book known as the bestiary was born.

The bestiary, or "book of beasts",
is more than just an expansion of the Physiologus,
though the two have much in common. The bestiary
also describes a beast and uses that description
as a basis for an allegorical teaching, but
by including text from other sources it goes
further; and while still not a "zoology
textbook", it is not only a religious text,
but also a description of the world as it was
known.

The bestiary manuscripts
were usually illustrated, sometimes lavishly,
as for example in the Harley
Bestiary and the Aberdeen
Bestiary; the pictures served as a "visual
language" for the illiterate public, who
knew the stories - preachers used them in sermons
- and would remember the moral teaching when
they saw the beast depicted. Bestiary images
could be found everywhere. They appeared not
only in bestiaries but in manuscripts of all
kinds; in churches and monasteries, carved in
stone both inside and out, and in wood on misericords
and on other decorated furniture; painted on
walls and worked into mosaics; and woven into
tapestries. This abundance of animal images
was not to the liking of some; St. Bernard of
Clairvoux, writing in his Apology around
1127, says: "What profit is there in those
ridiculous monsters, in that marvelous and deformed
comeliness, that comely deformity? To what purpose
are those unclean apes, those fierce lions,
those monstrous centaurs, those half men, those
striped tigers, those fighting knights, those
hunters winding their horns? Many bodies are
seen under one head, or again many heads to
one body. Here is a four-footed beast with a
serpents tail; there a fish with a beasts
head. Here again the fore-part of a horse trails
half a goat behind it, or a horned beast bears
the hind quarters of a horse. In short, so many
and marvelous are the varieties of shapes on
every hand that we are tempted to read in the
marble than in our books, and to spend the whole
day wondering at these things rather than meditating
the law of God. For Gods sake, if men
are not ashamed of these follies, why at least
do they not shrink from the expense?"

Medieval animal illustrations are usually not
"realistic"; in many cases the artist
could never have seen an example of the beast,
even of those which were not fabulous. Thus
medieval European illustrators often drew the
crocodile
as a dog-like beast (as in British Liibrary,
Royal MS 12
C. xix, folio 12v), the whale
as a large, scaled fish (Kongelige Bibliotek,
Gl. kgl. S.
3466 8º, folio 59v), the ostrich
with hooves (British Library, Royal
MS 2 B. vii, folio 113v) and many serpents
with feet and/or wings. The illustrator based
his drawing of an unknown animal on the written
description or on other illustrations or carvings
he had seen. Many manuscripts have peculiar
animal pictures merely because of the lack of
skill of the illustrator, who may have been
the most artistic monk in the monastery, but
no true artist. Other manuscripts can only be
described as works of art, with magnificent
paintings in many colors, with a lavish use
of gold.

When it came to fabulous animals like the unicorn,
dragon or
griffin, the
illustrator had no choice but to follow the
descriptions or earlier drawings. Whether medieval
people believed that such creatures really existed
is debatible; some undoubtedly did (as some
still do today), while others recognized them
as the product of human imagination. For fabulous
creature mentioned in the Bible (as unicorns
and dragons are), the problem became more difficult;
if the Bible is acknowledged to be the true
word of God, any animal it mentions must surely
exist. To that is added the medieval reliance
on, and belief in the veracity of, the writing
of ancient authorities such as Pliny and Aristotle,
who clearly say these beasts exist "in
the East" or "in Ethiopia" where
others claim to have seen them. In any case,
whether the beasts existed or not they were
as suitable as vehicles for moral and religious
teaching as the more mundane animals of the
European fields and forests.

A large number of bestiary manuscripts are written
in Latin, in the Middle Ages the common language
of scholars and clerics, with many more written
in vernacular languages, mostly French. The
Latin bestiary was primarily a product of England,
though a few were produced elsewhere, particularly
in France. Their authors or compilers are unknown,
but there are several distinct groups or "families"
of manuscripts. In France, several vernacular
verse bestiaries appeared, in various dialects
of what is now French, and in these the author
usually gives us his name. Gervaise
wrote his Bestiaire in the Norman French
dialect around the beginning of the thirteenth
century, as did Guillaume
le Clerc; Philippe
de Thaon wrote his in the Anglo-Norman dialect
around 1121. In the early thirteenth century
Pierre
de Beauvais wrote two versions of a prose
French Bestiaire. Many copies of the
French bestiaries remain.

In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries a
series of encyclopedias appeared, by such writers
as Jacob
van Maerlant, Konrad
von Megenberg, Thomas
of Cantimpré, Lambert
of Saint-Omer, Bartholomeus
Anglicus, and Hrabanus
Maurus, and others. These texts are not
bestiaries; while they usually contain some
bestiary material, they generally do not use
allegory. They all have sections on beasts,
birds, fish and serpents, but they also cover
the whole range of the knowledge of the time,
in the categories we recognize as theology,
philosophy, medicine, astronomy, chronology,
zoology, botany, geography, and mineralogy.
The encyclopedia authors copied materials from
each other and from earlier encyclopedists such
as Isidore of Seville and Pliny the Elder, as
well as from Aristotle, Ptolemy, and many others.
The encyclopedias, writen in Latin as well as
in German, Dutch and French, were widely popular;
hundreds of manuscript copies still exist.

Some medieval animal lore was not at all religious,
though it still sometimes had a moral message.
The fables of Aesop were well known, as were
other moralizing fables involving animals. One
of the most popular of the fable series was
that of Reynard
the Fox, the "trickster" figure
of the Middle Ages. Reynard is certainly no
example for the proper life; the stories depict
him as a schemer, a liar, a thief, and a killer,
yet in the end he always gets away with his
misdeeds, usually at great cost to those around
him. The Reynard stories were particularly popular
in the Netherlands, Germany and France, where
several vernacular versions were produced.

This web site deals with any and all aspects
of the general topic "animals in the Middle
Ages", though there is an emphasis on the
manuscript tradition, particularly of the bestiaries,
and mostly in western Europe. The subject is
vast, so this a large site, with well over 3000
pages, and perhaps the best way to explore it
is to just wander around. The various pages
making up the site are extensively linked; any
text appearing in this blue color
is a link (except for that one!). You can also
click the green arrows at the top and bottom
of each page; these will take you from one section
to the next, or to the next page in a series.
If you get lost, click the button on any page to return to the table
of contents. If you are interested in bestiary
manuscripts, start wil the section on the manuscript
families, which will link you to various
other pages of interest. If you want to learn
about a particular animal, start with the Beasts
pages. If you are looking for something in particular,
try the site search.
For more help in navigating the site, click
the green on any page.

Informal articles, opinionated reviews, and irreverent comments
on the bestiary genre can be found in the bestiary blog,
Chimaera.